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Canberra scraps plans for media service

THE AUSTRALIAN government has rejected plans for a service to provide
journalists with information about science and technology. The Australian
science minister, Barry Jones, has said that the service will not receive
enough use to justify its cost. He also questioned the value of similar
services in the US and Britain, on which the idea was based.

Jones’s comments have been criticised by Alan McGowan, the head of the
Scientists’ Institute for Public Information in New York. The institute
runs the Media Resource Service in the US. Jones’s comments had ‘no basis
in fact’, said McGowan last week.’ The Australian Academy of Science had
planned to set up a service called the Australian Science and Technology
Information Service (ASTIS), to be housed at the University of Technology
in Sydney. ASTIS had been promised A$330,000 (Pounds sterling 145,000) from
private sources, but the academy sought a matching sum from the government.

Canberra gave the academy A$30,000 to conduct a feasibility study into
ASTIS. Jones and John Button, the minister for industry, technology and
commerce, have now rejected the conclusions of the feasibility study.

According to the study, the register would save time for journalists
trying to contact an expert in a particular field. But Jones said in a letter
to the academy that its study failed to explain how and why the use of ASTIS
would increase significantly. It was unlikely, he said, that personal telephone
contacts between journalists and scientists would raise the quality and
quantity of science writing.

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The American and British information services received ‘small usage’,
claimed Jones. Australia’s proposed service could expect between 312 and
477 calls each year. ‘It is hard to see why these media resource services
are described as highly successful,’ he said.

McGowan disagrees. In a letter to the ASTIS planning office, he said
that his service was neither unsuccessful nor passive as Jones had apparently
concluded. ‘We must be speaking a different language,’ he said.

The academy is angered by the government’s decision and has asked that
it be reconsidered. ASTIS was mooted partly in response to criticisms by
Jones in 1984 that scientists were ‘wimps’ who did not get their message
across to the public. And Peter Pockley, a science journalist and the main
planner of ASTIS, has claimed that money was siphoned away from it to prop
up the Australia Prize, one of Jones’s pet projects.

An official at the industry Ministry said that science could be better
served if money was spent on lectures and workshops involving scientists
and journalists.